Desmond Morris

A concise compendium of the lives and work of the 101 most significant Surrealists by one of the last surviving members of the movement, bestselling author and artist Desmond Morris, who knew several of the key participants personally. 2024 marks the centenary of Surrealism, one of the most influential artistic movements of the modern era. In 1924, André Breton wrote...

No other art movement in history has contained two artists as different as Magritte and Miró. This is because Surrealism was not in origin an art movement, but a philosophical strategy. It was a way of life—a rebellion against the establishment that had given the world the hideous slaughter of the First World War. Instead of trying to analyse the...

'The owls are not what they seem'. From ancient Babylon, to Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat and the grandiloquent, absent-minded Owl from Winnie the Pooh, to David Lynch's Twin Peaks, owls have woven themselves into the fabric of human culture from earliest times. Beautiful, silent, pitiless predators of the night, possessing contradictory qualities of good and evil, they...

Examining the body language displayed in works of art is a whole new way of looking at art. The gestures portrayed can reflect the mores of a particular period in history, the customs of a certain culture, or a fashion in artistic styles. Exploring these with masterful subtlety, celebrated artist and anthropologist Desmond Morris uncovers fascinating insights about changing social...

The leopard is the ultimate cat. It makes the lion and the tiger appear overblown, and all the other members of the cat family look puny. Whereas lions hunt in the open and then share their kill, the leopard is solitary, stealthy, and selfish. This cat ambushes its prey and then carries it high into a tree where it can...